Hearing is Believing : The Recordings of Williams

Hearing William Carlos Williams read his poems is a great gain. But setting his recorded reading alongside the printed text of the poem can be even greater. As Hugh Kenner suggests in his own recorded comment, a vital interplay is at work: "It seems to me that there is an audio-visual counterpoint. You have to hear the poem and you have to see it. . . . If you listen to a Williams recording, you'd better have the text in front of you, so you can see what he's doing with it."¹

It's an audio-visual counterpoint that regulates and keeps accurate his outgoing vocal impulse—his instinct to utter, and raise to poetic dignity, the ignored, the seemingly shapeless, or the fortuitously seen. Textual constraints bring that impulse to fruition, particularly in the short-line poems where, I would argue, some of Williams's finest achievements lie. Acoustics and a zest for spoken directness often lead the way for Williams in his creation of poems. But it is the visual form's cutting in upon the spoken flow which very much sharpens and shapes the written word, keeping the body of what's said nimbly on its toes and unpredictable, as well as spine-like in firmness.

For a boisterous instance we could do no better than go to the 1930 poem "The Sea-Elephant" (CP1 341–43). Before reading it at Princeton in 1952, Williams makes clear to his audience that he's not going to be patronized and made to feel a worm as a poet by the lofty examples of Eliot, Pound and Yeats. His Poetry Monster or vigorous art is proudly on display, even though caged:

Ladies and Gentlemen!the greatestsea-monster ever exhibitedalive the giganticsea-elephant! . . .

Widening the word "al-i-i-ve," Williams in the character of the fairground barker makes us hear the stretched-open syllables that come immediately after: "O wallow / of flesh where / are // there fish enough . . . ?" This enunciates the gaping appetite of his monster and his poetic outreach. But the reader of the text is also looking at the stanzaic impingements upon the sea-elephant's voice: the eye-astounding configurations in all their joyously changing shapes that bear the mark of the creature's insatiable need:

Blouaugh! (feed

me) myflesh is riven—fish after fish into his mawunswallowing

to let them glide downgulching backhalf spittle halfbrine

thetroubled eyes—tornfrom the sea.(In

a practical voice) Theyoughtto put it back whereit came from.

A later "Blouaugh!" derides the "practical voice" of the genteel lady, as Williams acts her in all her mincing distaste. But the previous roar (with its translation inside another bracket, and also made to look pusillanimous by being stretched across the stanza-gap) suggests a bulging vastness just held in and reflected by the uneven-looking stanzas. One-line words seem to pinch into the body of the monster only to make it extrude elsewhere—a containment, and a writhing against containment, that makes the eventual cry of the sea-elephant, "I am / love," not flaccidly sentimental but firm in its capacity, like Williams's art, to devour so much.

But this kind of disciplined outreach is very different from the big, inflated embrace that emanates from the three-step lines of "The Orchestra" (CP2 250–52) in the 1950s. There, crying "Ah, ah, and ah!" Williams moves towards the "common tone" ("Love is that common tone") which orchestrally encompasses everyone. And there, alas, he seems to be remembering only distantly what he could once hear in a more tightly clustering way when he remarked in the Lincoln chapter at the end of In the American Grain that Willem Mengelberg, conducting an orchestra, is like "a woman drawing to herself with insatiable passion the myriad points of sound" (AG 234). For surely that's what Williams himself is doing, with a focused, individualized love, in the first three stanzas of the 1927 "Young Sycamore" (CP1 266). He reads them here in a recording made...